Quotes About Editing

The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book.

I don't want to see the uncut version of anything.

I start drawing, and eventually the characters involve themselves in a situation. Then in the end, I go back and try to cut out most of the preachments.

'Waiting For Guffman' was different right away from 'Spinal Tap,' because we didn't show the interviewer. That person became invisible immediately. That created a different way of tuning it and ultimately editing it.

You can hardly turn around and not see something that was done in Photoshop.

When I went on to the team on 'Korero Mai,' I realized how much I didn't know and how much I wanted to know in terms of sound, lighting and editing which is a process you don't go through in fast turnaround TV.

I'm not one of these directors, so far, that wants to have a whole separate director's cut of these things. So far they've turned out to be kind of the length that they wanted to be.

I love directing more than anything in the world, and I love being in the editing room. I love cutting. When I'm shooting, I cut it in my head anyway. That's not to say that it always turns out that way, but you have a sense when you're composing a sequence or a scene how you want it to look anyway.

I think a man turns into a writer by editing his own texts.

So much of comedy happens between your chin and your shoulders. Nobody tells you when you get your own TV show that you're going to watch yourself in the edit room over and over and over again. It's a tough lesson.

I'm not a fan of these very cutty, handheld-y kind of films or TV shows, where a cut is just every half second or every two seconds, where you're desensitized to it. To me, a cut should say something and be impactful.

My toughest criticism usually comes from myself. As my editor can attest to, I'm never done tweaking a book until the production department has to rip it from my hands!

And that's how I start myself. I usually go back a couple of pages, maybe to the beginning of the chapter, and I start reading. And as I'm reading, I'm tweaking - putting in a different word, changing the syntax, putting that clause over there, you know that sort of thing.

We went from journalism, in newspapers that gets heavily edited, to blogs, where you can express your opinions, to tweeting, where you can say anything, and it gets repeated and becomes fact when it isn't. It's something the entire world is going to have to come to grips with.

When the simple word processors came in, writing became crisper, less dense - just because of the way we could instantly edit on the screen. Now the ability to mash up words and pictures and links and songs and tweets is what matters. I can't imagine what writing will be like in 2154.

I've quite often written tweets that I think are across that line, but I just delete them.

Once I get over maybe a hundred pages, I won't go back to page one, but I might go back to page fifty-five, or twenty, even. But then every once in a while I feel the need to go to page one again and start rewriting.

I have to re-write a lot. I couldn't tell you how many drafts I write, but I know I've done at least twenty rewrites on each book.

When I watch the movie, which is I don't know how many times I've done now with editing and everything, I walk out giddy just because I feel like that's the movie that I want to see.

The digital process gives me total control over how I want the film to look. The films look like they did when I was first looking through the viewfinder.

When you're editing, you want to be the perfect appreciator, not another writer.

I was a book editor for nine years. I'm familiar with the opposite experience, bracing myself for the likelihood that no one would want to publish my book.

I remember when I was working on All Alone in the Universe, and Robin Roy was my editor. When I first sent it to her, she said kids this age don't want pictures in their books.

When I photograph someone, I want to shoot the subject and get them out of my studio so I can play with the photos and do all the stuff I want.